Teaching Guide: Exploring Saratoga and Valley Forge in the Revolutionary War

By Adena Barnette, Ripley High School, West Virginia

This teaching guide helps instructors use a specific primary source set, Revolutionary War Turning Points: Saratoga and Valley Forge, in the classroom. It offers discussion questions, classroom activities, and primary source analysis tools. It is intended to spark pedagogical creativity by giving a sample approach to the material. Please feel free to share, reuse, and adapt the resources in this guide for your teaching purposes.

Summarize the anecdotes from the pamphlet about Washington and Lafayette. What do these anecdotes tell us about how the author, Nathaniel Hervey, interpreted the Battles of Saratoga and the winter at Valley Forge when writing in the early 1850s?

On the map of Valley Forge, what are the key geographic and man-made features included by the artist? Why might a Frenchman be the person to draw the encampment at Valley Forge?

Compare and contrast the types of structure evident in the photograph of George Washington’s headquarters and the photograph of a soldier’s hut. Based on the evidence, who do you believe faced a harder struggle at Valley Forge and why?

Classroom activities

Using the map of the Saratoga battlefield and the map of Valley Forge, ask classroom groups to create their own three-dimensional displays of the Battle of Saratoga or the encampment at Valley Forge. Students can design the displays using craft materials provided by the teacher or brought in from home. Encourage students to use geographical skills in drafting a key to explain symbols in the display and in ensuring the display is to scale. Students can view other groups’ final products during a gallery walk as a way to reinforce prior learning on these two pivotal events of 1777. During the gallery walk, ask students to choose one three-dimensional display to evaluate by determining its historical accuracy as compared to the map.

Ask students to assume the role of one of the soldiers who appears in one of the lithographs of either the Battle of Saratoga or Valley Forge. The students should create a historically-informed backstory for the soldier, based on evidence in either the The History of Valley Forge or the National Park Service publication, in order to write a letter home detailing their experiences. Students will share their letters in order to explore which details of the event were deemed noteworthy by their classmates.